Consumers face an ever-increasing number of annoying and harmful intrusions as they use and navigate the Internet. The number of unsolicited bulk e-mails (also known as “spam”) has grown consistently over the past decade, with some researchers now estimating that more than 80% of e-mail represents spam. Besides annoying consumers, spam e-mails consume precious network bandwidth and resources and may be used as a vehicle for propagating malware or committing fraud. Malicious and inappropriate websites may pose similar threats, and they may also cause difficulties for parents who wish to oversee the content accessed by their children.
Content-filtering vendors may spare consumers from many of these problems by maintaining databases identifying spam and malicious websites. When a consumer attempts to download or access an e-mail or web document, content-filtering systems installed on a consumer's computing system may query these databases for information to determine whether to filter out an e-mail or warn the consumer about the web document.
Unfortunately, traditional content-filtering systems may also have drawbacks. Each query may consume computing resources both on the consumer side and on the vendor side. Additionally, waiting for the result of a query before loading an e-mail or web document may add unwanted latency to the consumer's experience. Accordingly, the instant disclosure identifies a need for predictive responses to internet object queries.